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GTA 6’s Massive Leak Makes It Hard To Play GTA Online In 2023

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Grand Theft Auto: Vice City – 2002
Screenshot: Rockstar Games

Last year, footage of the next Grand Theft Auto—assumed to be GTA 6—leaked online. While Rockstar quickly tried to erase the videos from the internet and plug the holes in the ship, it was impossible to completely contain such a massive, unprecedented leak. So fans around the world got a very good look at the future of Grand Theft Auto. And now myself and others find it hard to go back to the aging GTA Online.

Late on September 19, 2022, 90 short videos of early gameplay of what would later be confirmed by Rockstar as the next GTA entry leaked online via a hacker. The footage revealed a lot about the next game in the massively popular open-world franchise, including that the series would be returning to Vice City, Florida, a fan-favorite location last seen in GTA: Vice City Stories, the prequel to the beloved PS2 classic, GTA: Vice City. It also gave us a good look at the new protagonists of this next criminal adventure and some of the missions we might experience when GTA 6 is eventually released. Fans even began mapping out the game’s virtual world using the leaks.

Rockstar undoubtedly hates the leak and likely wishes it could rewind time and prevent it from ever happening at all, but it did end up revitalizing the playerbase. For the first time in a long time, there was excitement and energy in the GTA community, which after years of GTA Online updates and poorly received remasters was in a pretty bad place prior to the leak. Even an early, unfinished or unpolished leak of GTA 6 was better than radio silence and glitchy remasters. People were pumped and hyped about the future of Grand Theft Auto in a way I hadn’t seen in years.

But then, once the leaks were scrubbed from the web and it became clear Rockstar wasn’t going to release any official teaser or trailer to capitalize on the moment, all I and other GTA fans could do was go back to GTA Online. And that’s harder to do now that I’ve seen the future.

Rockstar Games

The latest big and free expansion to GTA Online, Los Santos Drug Wars, was released late last year at a really bad time for me to play and cover it for the site. So I just…didn’t play it. For the first time ever in the history of GTA Online, I skipped a new update completely. I’ve still not played it. At first, I blamed my skipping of the latest update on bad timing and a busy schedule due to holidays and end-of-the-year content. But now, weeks removed from all that, with more free time to play stuff, I’ve still not fired up the new update. And I think it’s time to admit to myself that my growing burnout around GTA Online was increased greatly by that small taste of what’s to come. That look at the future of GTA in Florida ruined me.

I could go back and drive around the same highways and streets of Los Santos I’ve been cruising around since 2013. I could fire up the game and check out the newest business and missions connected to it. I could, sure. The thing is, I don’t know if I want to. I mean, eventually, I will play more GTA Online. I sort of have to as it’s part of my job here at Kotaku. Yet, if it wasn’t part of my career there’s a real chance that I might just never play GTA Online again.

To be clear: It’s not because GTA Online is worse today than it was a decade ago—it’s actually much better to play in 2023 than in 2013—but because getting a glimpse of a fresh new world has killed my desire to boot up the same old Los Santos after a decade of GTA Online and GTA V. I mean, just having new songs on the radio will be amazing. I love Queen’s “Radio Ga-Ga” but you can only hear it so many times in 10 years before you’re ready for new tunes, too.

At this point, I’m hoping the wait for Grand Theft Auto 6 and its sunny beaches, palm trees, and new characters isn’t too much longer, because I’m ready to leave Los Santos behind for a tropical vacation to Vice City.

 

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Technology

PS2 Emulator Development Ceases Following Death Threats

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Image: PlayStation / Kotaku / Victor Prilepa (Getty Images)

The sole developer behind AetherSX2, a PlayStation 2 emulator for Android devices, announced that they are discontinuing development of the app due to the “neverending” online impersonation, complaints, demands, and death threats they’ve endured.

“AetherSX2 was always meant to be a fun hobby for me, not profit driven. It doesn’t make sense to continue working on a hobby which isn’t fun anymore,” the developer said in a brief post on the AetherSX2 website announcing the suspension of development. “Thanks to everyone who wasn’t a d*ck for the last year.”

Prior to AetherSX2, the only viable emulation option for people who wanted to play PS2 games on their Android devices was DamonPS2. However, folks in emulator circles appreciated having AetherSX2 as an alternative because DamonPS2, a for-profit closed-source app, was accused of stealing source code by the team behind free open-source PS2 emulator PCXS2 in a now-deleted post that you can view through the Wayback Machine.

Leading up to the developer’s decision to discontinue working on AetherSX2, folks on the r/EmulatiotnonAndroid subreddit voiced concern over the pressure that the AetherSX2 developer dealt with while being inundated with demands from users. In a screenshotted Discord post, the AetherSX2 developer, who goes by the handle Tahlreth, explained why they disabled their Discord channel. According to the screenshotted post, “some moron” requested that they get the emulator to work on ioS.

“Congrats guys, you prodded and pushed another developer too much and they’re seriously considering just stopping for good,” Tahlreth wrote in the screenshotted Discord post.

Kotaku reached out to Tahlreth for comment.

According to the developer’s post on the AetherSX2 website, folks can still download and use current builds of AetherSX2 “for the foreseeable future.” As a footnote, the developer warned people to practice “good security hygiene” and not install any Android package files from random corners of the internet.

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Technology

EA Made PS2 Lord Of The Rings Game With Tiger Woods Golf Engine

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Image: EA / Kotaku

Making video games is very hard. It can take years of work to ship even a small game. One aspect that can take up a particularly large amount of time and resources is building a custom engine, which is why many devs utilize Unreal, Unity, or another pre-existing engine to help speed up development. That’s very common, but recently a really wild example from the PlayStation 2 days came to light in an interview with Glen Schofield, director of the new The Callisto Protocol.

Recently, the Callisto Protocol was released to…mixed reviews, let’s say (our own Ashley Bardhan liked how ambitious it was, despite some annoying difficulty spikes). Anyway, to help drum up publicity for the new horror game, director Glen Schofield has been going around doing interviews and whatnot. And two weeks ago he did a video with Wired in which he answered random tweets about game development. That’s where he revealed a fun bit of trivia about a popular Lord of the Rings game he worked on at EA.

In the Wired video, Schofield (who previously worked on Dead Space and Call of Duty) answers a question as to why devs don’t make their own engines anymore and instead use pre-existing tech. The director explains that it’s just too damn expensive and time-consuming to do this today, and that it’s almost always better to take an old engine and repurpose it, like he did at EA.

Wired

You see, when he was a producer on 2003 licensed beat ‘em up The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, his team spent a year working on a new engine for the game. But things were going slowly and the game had a hard deadline to hit. So he looked around at the various other engines EA was using for its games at that time to find some tech they could repurpose. And weirdly enough, he came to the conclusion that the latest Tiger Woods golf game had the perfect engine.

“Lord of the Rings is about large areas and then sort of a castle on the end or something, a fortress. What’s like that? Tiger Woods!” explained Schofield, “Long areas, and at the end is where you go get food, where you’re done. And so we took the Tiger Woods engine and turned that into a Lord of the Rings engine.”

Now, this is funny and interesting enough on its own. But one last part came to light earlier today on Twitter. It turns out, according to a former EA dev, that some modified Lord of the Rings visual effects code was later re-used on a PSP Tiger Woods game to create puffs of smoke during ball impact.

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Apparently the code of the PSP Tiger Woods game also contains references to Gandalf and other LotR characters, too. As ever, game development is messy and endlessly fascinating.



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Technology

The Divine Force Isn’t Terrible And That’s Enough

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Screenshot: Tri-Ace / Square Enix / Kotaku

I live only a 15-minute drive from the house where I grew up. My parents moved when I was in college, at which point the physical embodiment of every memory from my formative years was turned over to strangers, only to be revisited in my dreams. On the few occasions I’ve gone back to that street the memories come flooding back, but they’re a bad fit for the yards that now seem smaller and the houses that don’t look quite as freshly painted and kept up. Playing Star Ocean: The Divine Force can be similarly jarring: a monument to past comforts that occasionally delights, but whose cracked foundation and flaking paint remind you that it’s not your home anymore.

Once upon a time, Star Ocean was a solid JRPG series that offered fans a meaty alternative to Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest. It lets players embark on a Dungeons & Dragons style campaign within a larger Star Trek-inspired universe. It punched above its weight with frenetic combat, deep crafting systems, and an abundance of side content. There were multiple endings and roster tradeoffs depending on who you tried to recruit during your journey. Star Ocean: Second Story on the original PlayStation was good. The next game on the PS2 was even better. It’s been downhill ever since. Until now.

Screenshot: Tri-Ace / Square Enix / Kotaku

Star Ocean: The Divine Force, the sixth game in the series and the first one on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, is a clear improvement over the last game. 2016’s Integrity and Faithlessness was unremarkable, incomplete, and had a third-person camera that made you want to throw-up. A low bar to clear for sure, but Divine Force does more than just avoid the pitfalls of its predecessor. It also offers an innovative overhaul of the combat system that’s finicky but compelling, with the prettiest environments the series has ever achieved. I’ve been playing on PS5 in graphics mode, and while nowhere near the best looking JRPG on the console, the lush fields, detailed architecture, and colorful interstellar skies added an extra spark to otherwise barebones questlines filled with a tedious level of backtracking.

Does this mean Divine Force is a good game? No. I’m about six hours in, and so far, I haven’t seen anything that would make me recommend it to anyone who isn’t already among the rapidly shrinking group of diehard Star Ocean fans. For all of the game’s improvements and modern sensibilities, it’s nowhere near as focused, polished, or refined as Xenoblade Chronicles 3, or even last year’s Tales of Arise. For all of its surprising virtues, Divine Force just isn’t in the same league.

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Gif: Tri-Ace / Square Enix / Kotaku

The English voice acting is passable and occasionally endearing in its eccentricity, but mostly just seems stilted, due in part to a script that feels trapped, for better and definitely for worse, in a sort of PS2-era JRPG mad libs. Raymond, the captain of a merchant ship, crashlands on a medieval-era planet where he runs into a princess named Laeticia who is trying to stave off an invasion of her kingdom by a neighboring empire. Despite the menacing threats looming in the background, much of the early game is about getting mixed up in mundane parochial affairs while Raymond tries to regroup with his crewmates and mutters stuff like, “Who the hell are the people on this rock with horns growin’ outta their heads?” It’s pretty boring stuff.

Divine Force’s menu interface is especially hard to read.
Screenshot: Tri-Ace / Square Enix / Kotaku

The game comes to life more in-between these contrived story beats and laborious fetch quests. Conversations with NPCs are rarely interesting, but they occasionally open up side missions that unlock special items for taking advantage of the game’s crafting systems. While hardly any of this is signposted, the game’s more esoteric side is there for players willing to go off the beaten path and try to puzzle together what the game is trying to tell you to do.

Exploration and combat are augmented by a mechanical companion called the D.U.M.A. that lets you fly short distances or dash into enemies and stun them. A stamina count, meanwhile, regulates how often and rapidly you can unleash combos in fights. There’s also a roll-dodge that you can time to perfectly evade an incoming attack and counter with a powerful follow-up. While targeting can be a nightmare, and it’s often impossible to know if you’re about to be hit by something off screen, it makes combat feel more natural and responsive than past games.

Gif: Tri-Ace / Square Enix / Kotaku

The transition between exploration and combat is also seamless, and helps keep Divine Force moving along so that even when something leaves a bad taste in your mouth it doesn’t linger for long. That said, the environments you’re exploring, while occasionally vast and pretty to look at, are basically empty except for a few treasure chests and bread crumb trails of crystals you can collect to upgrade the D.U.M.A. Enemies always appear in the same groups at the same spot, whether it’s your first time visiting the location or your fifth. And despite the addition of short bursts of flight and a gliding ability, the platforming has been too imprecise for me to ever want to try and reach hard-to-get-to treasure chests.

Screenshot: Tri-Ace / Square Enix / Kotaku

So why am I still playing Divine Force? Because I’m one of those fans who was Star Ocean-pilled long ago, excitedly pouring through strategy guides trying to decide which character I would recruit and how not to miss them. I’m hardly the first person to remark on just how much the latest game feels like playing an HD tribute to Second Story and Till The End of Time. The sound effects are all still the same. You eat blueberries to heal and still can’t carry more than 20 at a time. And much of the early game at least revolves around running errands for kings and mages in an increasingly nonsensical series of nesting subplots. It’s been a nice stroke down memory lane but none of it’s as good as I remember.

Developer Tri-Ace is in a huge financial hole, and fans are worried that Divine Force might be the series’ last chance to prove it still deserves to exist. Some are even buying multiple copies of the game to try and keep the dream alive. But the initial sales data isn’t reassuring. In Japan at least, the game’s launch is shaping up to be the second worst in the series history. It’s hard to blame anyone, both because of the game’s flaws and the inherent limitations and niche appeal of the decades old formula, but also because there are just so many other JRPGs to choose from. I’m disappointed that Divine Force isn’t the triumphant comeback fans have begged for, but I’m not surprised. I’m just glad it’s not terrible, and that I got to visit one more time before the whole thing gets knocked down.

     



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Technology

A True Teenage Horror Story

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It would come sooner or later. There was no escape.
Image: Microsoft / Evan Amos / Kotaku

Hidden from the bustle of Jamaica Avenue, down a winding flight of stairs, the shop looked like a mausoleum, with stacks of busted PS2s, OG Xboxes, and GameCubes lining the walls. That small store in the Jamaica Colosseum Mall was the same place I’d once purchased Splinter Cell on PS2, Doom 3 for Xbox, and the Halo 2 Multiplayer Map Pack, among many others. But the dead consoles served as a jarring reminder that as vivid as the worlds those boxes produced could feel, sooner or later our machines of dreams would cease to function.

Back in late 2005, standing on the cusp of a new console generation, I understood intellectually that, over time, some of the new, cutting-edge Xbox 360s and not-yet-released PlayStation 3s would die someday. Maybe after another decade that shop would be filled with hourglass-shaped white monoliths and glossy black Foreman grills. But not just yet. It was the beginning of a new era, after all.

Back then, my teenage social circle was busy bickering over silly console wars, arguing in fast-food restaurants over whether or not Killzone 2’s 2005 E3 demo was real, or our PlayStation friends’ assurances that once we saw the next-gen SOCOM, we’d leave Halo and Xbox forever. But we all agreed on one thing: We were all psyched for the wild new possibilities these new machines promised. HD graphics, better custom music playlists, a conclusion (finally!) to Halo 2, and the promise of true next-gen experiences like Gears of War. What a time to be alive.

And in an era of expensive texting plans and limited social media, the new HD consoles’ online functionality would soon mark a shift in our social lives. In fact, that was the very reason many of us sought out broadband internet. United online, our circle would surely stay as bright as the flashy rings on the Xbox 360 itself.

We all saved up enough from whatever random jobs we had at the time to buy 360s and fulfill the escapist desire that beckoned us after last period let out. Our afternoons were filled with round after round of Halo 2 (eventually Halo 3), trash talking, arguing over whether Korn was better off without Head, figuring out how to best apply Gears of War cover tactics to Halo, convincing someone to give Lost Planet a try, ordering Chinese takeout (leaving one friend in particular stuck with the bill. We’re good now, right?), trading burned Incubus and HIM discographies to rip to our 360 hard drives, blasting Lamb of God’s Sacrament, and saying things like, “oh my god, have you seen this Mass Effect game coming out?” “Oblivion looks nuts!” and “Would you kindly die so I can take your sniper rifle?” Single-player or multi, gaming never felt more exciting or promising.

Who knew that E-day would be the least of our fears?
Image: The Coalition

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But in between the hollering over killing sprees and chainsawing aliens, talk occasionally turned to the rumors surfacing on forums about Xbox 360s suddenly failing. It always went the same way: a black screen, a bunch of red lights around the power button, and silence. Soon this failure had a name: The Red Ring of Death, or RRoD for short. I started out a skeptic and soon became a denier. “It can’t happen to us,” I thought. We were all relying on the 360 to stay in touch and game together as we drifted toward adulthood. It couldn’t happen to us.

The apparent cause always varied: different people playing different games for different periods of time. Eventually it seemed like the only thing these stories had in common was that three-quarters of the power button lit up red like a stoplight. Surely, I thought, folks just needed to take better care of their machines. It didn’t feel right. It didn’t make sense. It wasn’t the 360’s time to start dying. We all thought it was still in its best day. In our best days even.

We thought wrong.

The first among us who fell victim had it the worst. Over the course of a few years, one friend in particular would go through four Xbox 360s. By then, our social circle was in panic mode. We tried to become experts on which models shipped when, trying to glue together the internet anecdotes with what we were hearing from victims we personally knew. Which 360s were most susceptible? Were launch models okay? The Halo 3 edition? The Elite? Does horizontal or vertical orientation matter? The panic of losing our machines made it hard to be sure. But it wasn’t just about missing out on Halo nights. The 360 had become central to how we socialized.

We all started to physically drift apart after high school. Sure, MySpace was a thing, but it was Xbox Live that really kept our social circle intact. That’s where we not only gamed, but also talked about music, movies, life. All of it. Live became somewhat of a digital safe space as we faced the challenges of becoming adults.

But the red rings followed us online. When one of us fell to them, a portion of that social circle, much like the error sign on the machine itself, went dark. Microsoft’s repair program was generous, but we also couldn’t shake the fear of needing to spend another three or four hundred dollars. We worried over how much time we should spend on the machine. How much time we should spend with each other.

We all feared that we were gaming on borrowed time. A game of Capture the Flag could be redly interrupted. Some, like myself, tried to dig into the denial. How could the problem possibly be so widespread? But when someone with a Halo 3 edition finally got the error, the inevitability of death was too naked to deny. Eventually someone even RRoDed on an Elite, which we’d been sure was bulletproof. I remember a brief text exchange. “I did everything to keep it safe! I had three feet of space around it and an intercooler! How does this keep happening?”

Repair turnaround took weeks. And in the hectic buzz of moving from high school to college and getting full-time jobs, those weeks made it hard to keep up with each other and stay in touch. A 360 dying meant you wouldn’t speak to someone for weeks. Forget about rounds of Halo. We weren’t just deprived of our favorite game, the red rings actively pulled us apart from each other.

Grenades were exchanged for tumbleweeds as my friends fell to the rings.
Screenshot: 343 Industries / Kotaku

The red rings of death became a fog that swallowed each of us, one by one. Somehow my launch console remained exempt, but the fear of it hitting me became too much. Toward the end of the decade I started exploring the PlayStation 3’s library, and tried to convince friends to do the same. But the damage was done. Time continued to pass and the Xbox 360, once central to my social circle, didn’t just fail us. It killed us, one by one.

In the blur of years during which everyone else I knew suffered red rings, things started to calm down. Newer Xbox models appeared to address the underlying overheating issue, but our online social circle was smaller by then.

Even so, the 360 generation was far from over. We’d been through the worst of it, and still had amazing games to look forward to. One evening, I, the sole survivor, sat down to start up a new Mass Effect playthrough to get ready for the sequel.

But it was not to be. A dreadfully familiar series of lights appeared on the face of my Xbox, denying me entrance to the sci-fi RPG futureworld. After tearing through all of my friends, the Red Ring of Death had finally come for me.

 

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Technology

Every US PS2 Game Manual Has Now Been Preserved in 4K (and It Cost $40,000)

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A game preservationist called Kirkland has done a great service to the world of video games – he has created a complete set of U.S. PS2 game manuals online in 4K that can be viewed for free at any time. Oh, and it cost $40,000 to complete.

As reported by Kotaku, Kirkland has preserved over 1,900 PS2 game manuals, variants, art books, mini-guides, and comics by uploading them to Archive.org in 4K, and in doing so has forever opened a door to a time before the digital renaissance.

Kirkland’s Collection of PS2 Games (Image Credit: Kirkland and Kotaku)

These game manuals used to be part of the joy of purchasing a new game, and you’d read them to learn how to play the game, see special art and other surprises, and more. These manuals are mostly a thing of the past now and either live online or have disappeared altogether, but Kirkland has helped ensure they won’t ever be forgotten.

The entire package comes in at around 17GB (230GB before compression!) and are organized alphabetically so you can jump to your favorite game with ease. For example, you can jump right into the game manual of Final Fantasy X and learn about the controls, each of the characters, the battle system, abilities, Aeons, and more. Also included are ads for merchandise, the Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within DVD, and even an ad for Final Fantasy X-2.

As for why Kirkland chose to undergo this project that took him nearly 22 years to complete, he said it’s all about preserving that piece of history and that he wanted “our kids to be able to enjoy what we did.”

“The goal is to raise some awareness for game preservation efforts,” Kirkland said. “So many games growing up shaped how we looked at and experienced the world. Of course as we ‘grow up,’ we move to other things but there are a lot of us who have nostalgia for these things and want our kids to be able to enjoy what we did. The whole ‘read the books your father read’ deal. And there have been great efforts to preserve games: VGHF, the Strong Museum, and grassroots efforts like MAME, redump.org, No-Intro, and Cowering’s Good Tools before that. Which I always thought, ‘This is great! We’re going to have everything preserved. But without the manuals, we’re not going to know how to play them.’”

Kirkland had to take out the staples of each manual and scan each page through the Epson DS-870 sheetfed scanner. He then used a variety of apps to clean them up before uploading them in 2K and 4K resolution.

The Best PS1 Games Ever

Technology

Every U.S. PlayStation 2 Game Manual Is Now Scanned In 4K

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Physical game manuals are hard to come by these days, especially as the industry begins to heavily lean into cloud streaming and digital-first infrastructures. But if you remember those good ole times when game boxes came with chunky pamphlets for you to peruse before jumping into your recent purchase, a games preservationist called Kirkland seeks to preserve that nostalgia for posterity by creating high-quality scans of the manuals of yore. In fact, he’s just finished uploading his complete set of U.S. PlayStation 2 manual scans.

Launched in the U.S. in October 2000—22 years ago this Wednesday—Sony’s PlayStation 2 was one of the most popular consoles ever. With more than 4,000 games released worldwide and selling approximately 158 million units globally, just about everyone had a PS2. Games like Jak & Daxter and Sly Cooper helped popularize the console among kids and tweens, while titles such as Metal Gear Solid 2 and Onimusha continued growing a more “mature” market. Devil May Cry 3, Final Fantasy X, Kingdom Hearts, Ratchet & Clank, Silent Hill 2 (which is getting remade now), Okami, Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3—the list of PS2 hits goes on forever, all bangers.

My fave aspect of buying a new PS2 game was always reading the manual to see what tips, tricks, and occasionally cheats I could use. While that time is long gone, Kirkland has now preserved just over 1,900 of them, uploading every single U.S. PS2 manual to Archive.org in full 4K resolution for your downloading and scrolling pleasure. The set comes in it at roughly 17GB—it was 230GB before compression. That’s chonky.

Read More: Every Single English-Language SNES Manual Is Now Available Online

Each manual is just as cool as you might remember back in the ‘00s, with the high-quality scans highlighting the often-striking art. It really is a portal through time! I mean, browsing the manual for Square Enix’s Musashi: Samurai Legends (one of my fave PS2 games, ever) fills me with nostalgia, transporting me back to my grandma’s house when I’d stay up ‘til 3 a.m. slashing goons as the cropped-top wearing protagonist Miyamoto Musashi. Clearly, things haven’t changed much for me.

“The goal is to raise some awareness for game preservation efforts,” Kirkland told Kotaku. “So many games growing up shaped how we looked at and experienced the world. Of course as we ‘grow up,’ we move to other things but there are a lot of us who have nostalgia for these things and want our kids to be able to enjoy what we did. The whole ‘read the books your father read’ deal. And there have been great efforts to preserve games: VGHF, the Strong Museum, and grassroots efforts like MAME, redump.org, No-Intro, and Cowering’s Good Tools before that. Which I always thought, ‘This is great! We’re going to have everything preserved. But without the manuals, we’re not going to know how to play them.’”

Read More: The Decade-Long Struggle To Fund Oakland’s Scrappy Video Game Museum

Unfortunately for the manuals, scanning can be a pretty rough process. “My process is horrible. I pull the staples and run most everything through my Epson DS-870 sheetfed scanner. As a die hard perfectionist, using a document scanner is disappointing for quality, but a necessity due to volume,” he said. I spent seven months scanning SNES manuals and only made it to the letter ‘E’ using three flatbed scanners. With this setup I’ve been able to scan almost 75,000 pages in the last year alone.”

After the tedious work of scanning each page, Kirkland used a bevy of apps—like Adobe Acrobat Pro, Photoshop, Textpad, and PDF Combiner Pro—to get them as clean and pristine as possible before uploading them all to Archive.org in both 2K and 4K resolution. “I’ve spent entire summer vacations scanning manuals, only to discard them as I’ve gotten better equipment, or better processed,” he said. “Lots of late nights.”

Kirkland said he dropped about $40,000 on his U.S. PS2 collection as he methodically bought every U.S. release over the course of 22 years. “I grabbed new releases when they got down to $20 for about the first 800 releases, then I started picking up used sports games in good condition, then it was hunting down the odd variants (which is never-ending).”

Kirkland’s 4K U.S. PlayStation 2 scan set is likely the largest, highest-quality collection of video game manual scans publicly available, but to him, it doesn’t quite constitute “archival” quality.

Read More: Video Game History Foundation Goes Off On Nintendo’s ‘Destructive’ Retro Policies

“I consider this ‘functional preservation’ for now,” he said. “Since I’ve popped the staples, I can always chuck them on a flatbed to properly preserve them. But then it goes back to my perfectionist nature. What is ‘good enough’? 2400 dpi at 48-bit color (over one gigabyte per page). At what point are we archiving ink instead of images? There is no easy answer.”

Maybe further advances in technology will eventually make the task easier.

“In the future, I’d love to have an AI that can truly reconstruct the text and images as they were intended, correcting skew and properly descreening without blurring line art,” he said. “As it is, no one really wants a 600 dpi scan with staple holes and black edges, they just want the polished, finished project.“

Of course, getting there requires an incredible amount of labor on the part of the archivist.

While finishing over 1,900 PS2 manual scans might strike you as a good life’s work, it’s actually just another milestone for Kirkland. He’s previously completed the full set of U.S. SNES manuals in 2K (collecting those to scan cost him $8,000), and is in the process of chipping away at, SNES 4K, Atari 2600, and Game Boy. “I’ve scanned about 300 of the original PlayStation manuals the last few weeks,” he casually drops, as if it’s nothing.

Kirkland says he has about 7,500 manuals on hand, of which about 3,000 have already been preserved. He just wishes that this work didn’t all have to fall onto the backs of unusually motivated individuals like himself. “In a perfect world, companies would step up and release their original artwork sent to the presses for preservation,” he said. “But so many of those have been lost to history and hard drives over time.”

Hella hours and hella money later, that’s quite a collection.
Photo: Kirkland

Yet collaboration brings its own challenges.

“At this time it’s mostly a solo effort—which I’m hoping to change as I move on to systems I cannot 100%,” he said. “I’ve been burned in the past by collaborations, so I’ve been a little leery of attaching to other projects, in the hopes of having a little more control over quality and direction.”

The work is painstaking, and many of the manuals most in need of preservation are stuck in private collections or being jacked up in price by “investors.” But Kirkland plans to continue his scanning projects because, in his view, this work simply must be done before it becomes impossible.

“The internet has had 25 years to make it happen, and all we have are the same scanned manuals from 2004 that look like they came off a fax machine, or gimped NES manuals because NintendoAge old-timers were so paranoid people were going to counterfeit their expensive holy grails that they themselves scored for $5 at a garage sale in the ‘90s. It just doesn’t sit right with me that you have to pay $200 for the privilege of reading a Chrono Trigger manual that is actually legible.”

 

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Technology

Valve Shows Nintendo Switch Emulator In Steam Deck Video

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Screenshot: Valve / YouTube / Kotaku

There are a lot of reasons why people buy Steam Decks, Valve’s new portable gaming PC. It lets them take beloved Steam games on the go. Others use it to get the most out of Xbox Game Pass on PC. And some people use it to run a Nintendo Switch emulator called Yuzu. Valve admitted as much in a recent YouTube video showing off the handheld’s very Switch-like HDMI dock.

You had to be pretty eagle-eyed to spot the reference in the less than three-minute YouTube clip, but Twitter gaming insider Nibel did, and pointed it out in a tweet that immediately blew up. The Yuzu thumbnail on the home screen is only visible for a split second, but it’s absolutely there, and presumably was downloaded by whoever at Valve assisted in making the YouTube video.

Before the end of the day, Valve removed the video and swapped it with a new one in which the Yuzu thumbnail has been replaced by art for Portal 2. But the damage was done: One of the biggest gaming companies in the world had officially broached the taboo subject of video game emulation. “Streisand effect is strong with this one,” wrote one commenter. “I will definitely be emulating Switch on the Steam Deck.”

As an emulator, Yuzu lets people play Switch games on devices that aren’t the Switch. Traditionally that’s meant PCs, but because of Valve, and the flood of other portable gaming PCs hitting the market, there are other options now too. While some people likely pirate whatever Switch games they use the emulator for, it’s also possible to legally buy a Switch game, dump the ROM on a PC, and then use Yuzu or another emulator to run it, often at higher resolutions and framerates than is possible on Nintendo’s device. (More often people who wish to support a game’s developers will pay for the game and then download the ROM separately, which isn’t strictly legal, but considered a wash in many people’s minds.)

Valve’s revised Steam Deck dock video replaces the Yuzu reference with Portal 2.
Screenshot: Valve / YouTube / Kotaku

The Mario maker has historically taken a very hard line against any form of emulation, however. Once the DS and 3DS were hacked, they became notorious hotbeds for piracy, not just of decades old and out-of-circulation games, but of new ones as well. Earlier this year, anti-piracy company Denuvo announced a new suite of products aimed specifically at developers with games on Switch, promising to safeguard them against attempts to play them anywhere else by way of a new type of proprietary DRM.

The Steam Deck, meanwhile, has become a hotspot for all types of other emulation besides the Switch, including the Game Boy Advance, GameCube, and PS2. If you’ve ever heard anyone espouse the virtues of Valve’s new Switch competitor, its capable emulation abilities have likely been listed among its main perks. Normally Valve doesn’t make that explicit, however. I can only imagine how quickly founder Gabe Newell started getting phone calls from Nintendo’s lawyers, though of course we don’t currently have any evidence the latter was involved in getting the video taken down.

Valve and Nintendo did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

     



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Technology

PS5’s New VR2 Tech Is Making A Great First Impression

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Image: Sony

Sony’s PSVR for PlayStation 4, the first serious VR add-on for a console, did pretty darn well for itself. It was reasonably affordable, well received by players and critics alike, and got a lot more post-launch support than many prior PlayStation hardware efforts (RIP, dear Vita). Now, various outlets have gotten their first hands-on sessions with an early version of Sony’s upcoming PSVR2 for PlayStation 5. The anticipated new VR hardware doesn’t yet have an official price or launch date (just “early 2023”), but based on these impressions, it’s already making waves with critics.

A variety of outlets that got these hands-on demos describe the experience as being on par with presumably more powerful PC VR offerings from Valve or Meta. That said, it’s still going to be on Sony and other developers to create compelling games, and right now the new platform’s only exclusive experiences are a Horizon spin-off and a VR version of last year’s Resident Evil Village. The latter is playable for the first time in VR on Sony’s headset. There’s also a Walking Dead game and a Star Wars VR experience, both ports of prior PC/Quest VR games.

Overall, critics sound impressed, even wowed, by the experience. Among the qualities cited are the overall build quality and comfort, which seem to compete well with already-existing headsets. It’s still tethered, but the cable length sounds suitable enough. The graphical quality and overall “immersion,” in particular, are grabbing a lot of attention. One of the most bleeding edge features is the headset’s eye tracking, which allows the unit to optimize rendering based on where you’re looking, or in the future, lock gazes with other players. There’s also haptic feedback in the headset itself. Polygon notes that both features are used in Horizon, which is the most advanced showcase of the hardware so far.

Basically, it just needs some killer apps, and the quartet of existing demos sound like a solid start. Here are some highlights from each outlet’s hands-on impressions:

“Last week, I tried Sony’s new headset for the first time and was caught off guard by how stunning two of its marquee games, Horizon Call of the Mountain and Resident Evil Village, looked. They didn’t rely on particles or stylized art direction; they looked like AAA console games that just happened to be in VR. The past few years of playing Quest had recalibrated my expectations for how VR games should appear, and it was great to see games pushing forward visually once again without requiring an elaborate setup.”

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“But what does it feel like to actually play games on the PSVR2, with all of its new bells and whistles? The actual PSVR2 hardware was a joy to use. Like most modern VR headsets, it lets you adjust the head strap to make sure everything rests comfortably on your noggin, and you can tweak the inter-pupillary distance (IPD) so that the actual lenses inside the headset are the right distance for you. The screens looked great, though things sometimes felt just a little bit hazy at the edges, which could also happen with the first PSVR.”

“Wow. Wow, wow, wow. That’s the word that keeps springing to mind when I try to sum up my time with PlayStation VR2. As a fervent fan of VR for many years now, it’s safe to say that my first hands-on experience with Sony’s upcoming headset wowed my VR-loving socks off. This sleek and stylish unit was all I could have wanted for an upgraded PSVR headset and much, much more.

In terms of technological and visual quality, this feels like one of the more memorable generational console leaps. Experiencing the difference in visuals between the PSVR1 and the PSVR2 brought back memories of graduating to the sparkly, sharp, high-definition games of a PS3 after spending years playing games on the PS2 in standard definition.”

“Sony has touted much higher visual fidelity for PSVR2, which, for the tech-spec obsessed people out there, amounts to an OLED display that offers a resolution of 2000×2040 per eye, HDR, refresh rates of 90Hz and 120Hz, and a 110-degree field of view. This is all impressive on paper, but when you experience it with the headset on, it’s a bit of magic.

The level of detail on display was genuinely overwhelming, mostly because I didn’t expect it from a VR game. I know how dismissive that sounds of all the VR games out there, of which there are certainly more than a few impressive-looking ones. However, there’s a clear line between the way a VR game and a non-VR game look—there’s a level of richness, detail, and polish that separates the two. Horizon Call of the Mountain blurs that line on PSVR2.”

“PlayStation VR2 thankfully feels like a modern entry into the VR landscape, with top-notch visual fidelity and comfortable ergonomics. Its haptics and adaptive triggers, if implemented well, will be a welcome addition to the immersive experience. As with all new pieces of hardware, the question now falls to whether there will be enough games to make the investment worth it. First-party games like Horizon Call of the Mountain certainly help assuage those fears, and while nothing has been announced yet, I would be shocked if the outstanding Half-Life: Alyx didn’t make its way to the platform.”

 

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Technology

Game Pass Vs. The New PS Plus, The Comparison We Had To Make

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Image: Sony / Microsoft / Kotaku

Two months ago, Sony reimagined PS Plus, its longtime membership program for PlayStation owners. Now, it looks a whole lot like Microsoft’s Game Pass: For roughly the same amount of money, both offer access to a Netflix-style games-on-demand library. Obviously, we had to stack the two services up against each other.

Price

Game Pass is available as a subscription for console, PC, or both. The two separated tiers cost $10 a month. Xbox Live Ultimate, which joins the two and provides access to the EA Play Library (a similar games-on-demand service) and Xbox Live Gold, costs $15 a month. There is no way to pay for multiple months or a year up front at a tiered markdown (at least officially).

PS Plus is also available for a subscription, but it gets very complicated very fast. There are two new tiers. The Extra is $15 a month, or $100 for the year, and offers free monthly games, online play, and a catalog of on-demand games including some of Ubisoft’s library. Premium is $18 a month, or $120 a year, and adds access to classic games, game trials, and cloud streaming for most of the games in the library. That’s a huge price difference, and while PS Plus Premium is more expensive month-to-month, it’s actually almost 50 percent cheaper if you commit to the whole year.

Winner: PS Plus

Streaming

Game Pass allows for cloud-streaming, provided you pay for the pricier Ultimate tier. The streaming functionality is technically still “in beta,” but it is for all intents and purposes up and running. Microsoft recommends internet speeds of at least 10mbps for mobile devices and 20mbps for consoles and PCs. Based on Kotaku’s testing, it’s…fine? Despite cloud gaming’s huge advancements recently, streaming still can’t compete with downloaded games. The latency, however minor, is unignorable. As such, cloud gaming is best used for puzzlers, chill RPGs, light platformers, and other games that don’t demand split-second reflexes.

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Microsoft says “more than 100” games are currently streamable via cloud gaming on Xbox Game Pass, but more games are added every few weeks. Right now, the Game Pass library currently lists 381 games as capable of streaming.

Stray.
Screenshot: Annapurna / Kotaku

To unlock streaming on PS Plus you need to buy the $18 a month tier. And even then, the streaming quality is nothing to write home about. At best, it’s as good as Xbox Cloud Gaming. Sometimes it’s worse. Roughly 320 games from the Premium library can be streamed on console or PC, and a good chunk of those are PS3 games and classics rather than the full PlayStation 4 library. For example, Marvel’s Avengers and Stray are available on console but not in the streaming library.

Most notably, you can’t stream PS Plus games to your phone. For now, the service relies on Remote Play, meaning you need a console to play on mobile and you must be on the same WiFi network.

Winner: Game Pass

Game Library

Of course, a games-on-demand service is only as good as the one thing it’s supposed to provide: games.

Right now, the Xbox Game Pass library has about 475 games, but that tally comprises the library across both tiers, including the 92 games currently part of EA Play. The main draw, of course, is that Microsoft puts its entire first-party portfolio on the platform. That also includes the major tent poles—like Halo Infinite and Forza Horizon 5, alongside forthcoming blockbusters like Starfield and Redfall—which become available the day they came out. Third-party games tend to stick around for a year at most, though some, like Rockstar’s open-world Hold ‘Em simulator Red Dead Redemption 2, become unavailable after a matter of months. It’s unpredictable.

Halo Infinite.
Screenshot: 343 Industries

The library also regularly cycles in third-party games and often serves as a launch pad for indie gems. This year alone, the twee Zelda-like Tunic, the snowboarding sim Shredders, and the puzzler-cum-dungeon-crawler Loot River all launched on Game Pass. (Here’s Kotaku’s list of the best under-the-radar games currently available.) Developers have acknowledged to Kotaku that debuting on Game Pass cuts into initial sales but is ultimately worth it for the tradeoff in publicity.

PS Plus Extra currently includes around 430 PS4 and PS5 games, while Premium adds another 395 from PS1, PS2, PS3 (streaming only), and PSP. While the classics are a nice bonus, the biggest draw by far are the PlayStation exclusives like Horizon Zero Dawn, God of War, Spider-Man: Miles Morales, and Bloodborne. Unlike Microsoft, Sony has committed to not putting its newest releases on the service day-and-date, and if Returnal arriving a year after release is any indication, it seems like a good bet that players will have to wait at least a year to 18 months before newer stuff appears.

There are plenty of strong contenders in the third-party department though. Games like Final Fantasy VII Remake, Prey, Control, Doom, and Tetris Effect are all present, as are indies like Celeste, Outer Wilds, Dead Cells, and Virginia. The library has plenty of diversity and was bolstered most recently from the same-day addition of Stray, which is already a 2022 GOTY contender. The Ubisoft component, led by Assassin’s Creed Valhalla is also a strong compliment. At the same time, Sony hasn’t yet demonstrated it is, or will be, as aggressive as Microsoft in courting a steady stream of third party day-and-date additions. There’s also no PC-exclusive portion of the library.

Winner: PS Plus

Ari: Going into this exercise, I totally imagined it’d paint a clear picture of Game Pass superiority, but these two services seem fundamentally identical to me—right down to the UI—with Sony’s new version of PS Plus marginally better in the few aspects that matter. The prices are mostly the same, but the option to pay for a year of PS Plus at a “discount” edges out Game Pass in that regard. Sure, Game Pass’ big draw is that it puts Microsoft’s first-party games on the service at launch, but…Microsoft barely has any first-party games out this year! Right now, that perk seems like little more than a marketing line.

Ethan: I also thought Game Pass would be the clear winner coming out of this, but now I’m conflicted as well. Not everyone can afford to pay for a full year up front, but it really changes the calculus in this matchup. There are some other key differences as well, and while I don’t think they make one a clear winner over the other, I do think it makes it easier to decide which you want to pay for. Want immediate access to a meaty back catalog of some of the biggest and best games from the last generation? PS Plus wins. Want to stay current on some of the best new games coming out every month and play them at any time on your phone? Then it’s Game Pass all the way.

 

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